9. Tokyo

Whilst the original port of Edo was chosen by Tokugawa Ieyasu when Shogun to become capital of Japan, it was only in the late 19th century when the Shogunate was terminated that the city of Tokyo emerged and was to be developed around the mouth of the river with the generally higher ground of the ‘Yamanote’ and the lower ground to the east of the ‘Shitamachi’.

Whilst earthquakes, fires and wars served to totally destroy the city, just some parts of the old Imperial Palace remain.

Today, Tokyo has 23 Wards that circumscribe the central wards of Chiyoda and Chuo, Minato, Shinjuku and Shibuya.

These are now typified as having quite different and distinctive characteristics, from either having a dense urban core within the Yamanote loop train line, to outer suburbs that retain residential village characteristics, with intensively developed areas around the stations.

There are some surviving pocket areas that still remain, of alleyways and clusters of multi-occupancy buildings with infills built either under elevated transport viaducts or over channelised water courses that used to flow into Tokyo Bay.

However, rising above these localised areas can be seen either high rise corporate developments in the mercantile city, mainly commercial office towers, or residential mass housing blocks of increasing density like Roppongi Hills.

These types of development now predominate resulting in either emergent mega commercial or residential urban centres in evidence, which have been facilitated by revised regulations that permit increasingly dense development.

As outlined by Jorge Almazán and StudioLab* in ‘Emergent Tokyo’, they distinguish between corporate-led Tokyo and emergent urbanism.

“The patterns of yokocho alleyways, zakkyo buildings, undertrack infills, ankyo streets and dense low-rise neighbourhoods collectively point toward a distinct urban model: a Tokyo model of emergent urbanism that arose as much from the bottom up through serendipity and painful necessity as it did through intentional design.”*

Hence whilst the main city fabric has these different characteristics with interspersed built features of very high density, at the perimeter land reclamation has been ongoing in the bay south-eastwards (viz Odaiba Island) in order to secure new land areas suitable for commercial and light industrial use along the waterside.

Whilst requiring less land than Haneda International Airport (HND), the challenges of sinking ground as at Kansai Airport and of sustainability need to be recognised.

With bridges and tunnels across the bay, infrastructure leads land restitution and development plans as foreseen futuristically for a floating metropolis as that by Kenzo Tange and others, to modern neo-plans as for the ‘Tokyo Bay eSG Project’ based on ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance principles).

Given the ongoing development pressures, whilst these plans are likely to continue to be elaborated, the technical challenges are no less diminished especially under ongoing climate change.

*Jorge Almazán & StudioLab – Emergent Tokyo, Designing the Spontaneous City – ORO Editions, 2024.